Carlton Gary was smart and lucky for much of his life.
But it was his confidence in his smarts and in his luck that got him caught and, ultimately, convicted and executed as the Columbus “Stocking Strangler,” the man who raped and murdered three elderly women in the late 1970s.
"I really think he thought this day wouldn't come," said Mike Sellers, the former Columbus police sergeant who discovered the link that identified Gary as one of Georgia's most notorious serial killers.
Credit: Georgia Department of Correction
Credit: Georgia Department of Correction
Sellers didn't say anything that might interfere with Gary's execution and agreed to talk to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution only after Gary had been put to death.
Gary, 67, was pronounced dead at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison near Jackson at 10:33 p.m. Thursday, almost 40 years after the discovery of the body of the last Stocking Strangler victim on April 20, 1978.
Gary was executed for strangling three women with their own stockings — Florence Scheible, 89; Martha Thurmond, 70; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. But he also was blamed, yet never charged, for the rapes and strangulations of four other older women, and for the rapes of two more in Columbus' Wynnton neighborhood in 1978 and 1979.
Gary later was linked to two murders and a rape in New York in the early 1970s.
Until his execution, Gary steadfastly insisted that someone else was the Stocking Strangler.
But he went to his death without offering any final words.
He didn’t even glance at his victims’ relatives or the law enforcement officers who were there to witness his lethal injection.
“I wished he had at least opened his eyes and looked at everybody,” said Sellers, who watched the execution from the middle of three pews in the execution chamber’s observation area. “But I guess because he was outnumbered and all his tricks and cons were used up, there was nothing he could do.”
Sellers, now an investigator for the attorney for Clarke County, said he learned a lot from the Gary case — skills invaluable in law enforcement.
For example, the Stocking Strangler eluded police for years, and Sellers said he learned how Gary was able to do that.
“He said a couple of times, when police would get close, he’d be up in a tree,” Sellers said. “He also said cops always come … on straight routes so … he went through backyards, etc., to get away. Cops get impatient and they stick around awhile and they’re gone.”
Or they leave the scene for bathroom breaks.
Gary, however, would relieve himself in the bushes and simply “wait them out,” Sellers said the strangler boasted.
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Sellers also learned that returning all phone calls, even those that seem unusual, can pay off, as it did in the Gary case.
When the Columbus police came up with a name, it had been six years since the last Stocking Strangler victim was found.
A man who had been visiting his mother when the strangler was active called in April 1984 to ask about a gun that was taken when his car was stolen from a street in the Stocking Strangler’s targeted neighborhood.
Sellers put out a nationwide alert for the stolen .22-caliber Ruger.
“I still remember the serial number: 17-70073,” Sellers said.
Credit: AJC file
Credit: AJC file
The nationwide alert caught the attention of Michigan state police. One of Gary’s relatives had registered the gun in Michigan, not knowing it was stolen.
Police learned the gun had passed through the hands of several Gary relatives. And the first was Gary’s uncle in Phenix City, Ala. He said he got the gun from a nephew who’d recently escaped from prison in South Carolina — Carlton Gary.
Columbus police got Gary’s fingerprints from South Carolina, where he was known as the “Steakhouse Bandit.” Those prints matched the ones found on the screen to the window used to get inside the Columbus home of strangler victim Kathleen Woodruff on Dec. 28, 1977.
Gary was arrested at an Albany, Ga., motel less than a month after the call about the stolen gun.
And it was during that one-and-a-half-hour drive from Albany to Columbus, through a violent storm, that Gary started talking.
“Our intentions were not to question him until we could sit down and look at him, eye to eye,” said Sellers, who rode in the back seat with Gary while two other Columbus detectives were in the front.
But Gary started talking moments after he was advised of his right to remain silent.
Gary admitted to being at the homes of the strangler victims, but said someone else was the killer.
“Carlton said, ‘OK, enough of the B.S. I’ll tell you the truth,’” Sellers recalled.
But Gary’s story changed with each telling.
Once inside Columbus police headquarters, where reporters were waiting, Gary continued to talk, saying a man named Michael Crittenden was the killer.
Sellers said this is what Gary did with detectives in New York — deflect attention away from himself and “show people he would be a great witness.” Gary pleaded guilty to burglary in Albany, N.Y., but said another man killed the 85-year-old woman who lived there in 1970. He again blamed someone else for sexually assaulting a woman in Syracuse, N.Y., in early 1977, but pleaded guilty to possession of stolen goods because he had her watch.
That day in Columbus police headquarters, “He said, ‘I burglarized the houses and Michael killed the old ladies,’” Sellers said. “He said, ‘I could show you better than I could explain.’”
For the next two hours during the early morning of May 4, 1984, Sellers and the two other detectives drove around the Wynnton neighborhood’s dark streets with Gary — hands cuffed and feet shackled — directing them.
The streetlights had been knocked out.
The neighborhood was quiet, Sellers recalled.
It was creepy, he said.
“We went past a couple of houses and he’d say, ‘Stop. Slow down just a minute. Let me look. Back up,’” Sellers recalled.
First they passed the house where Mary Willis “Fern” Jackson, 59, was found on Sept. 16, 1977. Though she was believed to be the strangler’s first Columbus victim, the details of her death were only used at trial to show a pattern.
“The second one was Mrs. Scheible,” Sellers said.
“He said go around the block (and) down the hill. He said, ‘Right there. Eberhart. That’s where I got the Rugar from,’” Sellers said.
"After that he said, 'Now down this road (is) Mrs. (Jean) Dimenstein's house.'" Sellers noted that years later, Gary's DNA was matched to evidence found on the 71-year-old woman, whose murder was also only used against Gary to show a pattern.
Gary told them that “Michael” had taken the pins out of a door to get inside the Dimenstein home. Police on Sept. 24, 1977, found that door off its hinges and propped up a few feet away.
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Gary would describe the insides of victims’ houses in great detail, Sellers said.
And, Sellers said, Gary was “telling us stuff we didn’t know.”
Gary pointed out a house where he broke in twice. The first time he left because the woman’s husband was there, but he took the couple’s Cadillac. The second time he fled when he set off a floor alarm.
Gary told Sellers that he hid in the bushes for a while, then went to the nearby home of Mildred Borom, 78. Sellers said while police were investigating the alarm, Gary raped and strangled Borom, whose body was found the morning of Feb. 12, 1978.
“We’ve been looking for this guy all these years, and I’m sitting in the back seat with him, the monster who had crawled off here and caused so much agony and fear,” Sellers said. “I bumped him with my elbow to make sure he wasn’t a ghost. It was like there was the ghost that nobody could find, nobody could catch. He just slips in and slips out.”
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